This invention relates to systems and methods for adjusting an image to be printed by a multi-station image forming apparatus.
In electrophotographic printing, a photoconductive surface is charged and is then selectively exposed to image data to selectively discharge portions of the charged photoconductive surface. This forms a latent electrostatic image on the photoconductive surface. Charged toner material is then applied to the latent image bearing portion of the photoconductive surface to convert the latent electrostatic image into a developed image. Finally, the developed, or toner, image is transferred to a sheet of recording material, such as paper, by charging the backside of the paper to attract the toner of the developed image from the photoconductive surface to the paper. The developed, or toner, image is then at least semi-permanently fixed to the sheet of recording material, such as, for example, by heating a thermoplastic toner material to fuse the toner to the sheet of recording material. An example of this process is more fully described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,297,691.
In full color image-on-image systems, this process is repeated a number of times on the photoconductive surface to build a multilayer full-color image. In the image-on-image technique, a first latent image is developed onto a portion of the photoconductive surface. Subsequent latent images are exposed through the first image, on the same portion of the photoconductive surface, and then developed.
As an option to full color image forming devices, color image forming devices have also been designed and developed which apply a single additional highlight color (HLC) to a black toner image. The highlight color is used to draw the attention of the document reader to particular portions of the document. For example, highlight color image forming devices are often used to generate invoices for services, wherein the total of the invoice is printed in the highlight color or surrounded by a box in the highlight color.